


Lies and truths and pain

by Lilliburlero



Series: Sympathy and sulphur [3]
Category: David Blaize - E. F. Benson, The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: 1930s, Ableist Language, Age Difference, Cambridge, Crossover, Crossover Pairings, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Misogyny, Outdoor Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-21 08:57:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14912367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: After David's marriage to a Mary Renault Mother™, Frank works out how to survive.*To Nineveh_uk's prompt: Frank/David: sixes and sevens. I'm afraid 'sixes and sevens' took my mind straight to this series, where they're slightly estranged.Note: period-typical everythings, c.20-year age gap between sexual partners, characters who are their own exhaustive list of content warnings.





	Lies and truths and pain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nineveh_uk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nineveh_uk/gifts).



> The events of [Only Slightly Soiled](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2662331) and [A Straight Look](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2792141) have also occurred in this universe, though observant readers might note a couple of timeline irregularities.

'It’s all so—’ 

The boy looked somehow at once abashed—Frank reminded himself not to think of him as _the boy_ , he must be twenty-four now, and he looked the best part of a decade older—and derisive.

‘What?’ Frank asked. 

‘Well, so _good_.’ 

He made a gesture taking in the plain linen and Denby crockery, the silver chafing dish with its solitary remaining rasher, the toast cold and crisp in the rack, the pots of Margery’s homemade jam and marmalade. Would those become—even thinking her name rumpled his mind like linen pushed to the foot of the bed on a hot night— _Elaine’s_? Her cook doubtless made preserves. Frank thought he would prefer the efforts of Messrs Tiptree, and replied over-brightly, ‘Don’t you live it up when you get the chance?’ 

‘Well, yes, but—’ 

‘The nautical value is slightly different?’ Frank winced, having hoped not to plump for avuncularity quite so early on, but the—Lanyon smiled with more than a nephew’s tolerance. 

‘You could say that. How’s the head?’ 

‘Filthy. But nothing a glass or two of Hock with lunch won’t help.’ Frank hoped that his helpless retching in the lavatory at about six in the morning—not in the least caused by the considerable fill of drink, far better if it had been—had not been overheard. 

Lanyon’s weathered complexion wasn’t the sort that blanched easily. But all the other signs showed: the rapid blink, flaring nostrils, a bob of the Adam’s apple. ‘I don’t suppose you know an early house?’ 

‘I don’t. I suppose one of the places down by the market might be—no, but it’s Sunday.’ 

‘Of course. I say, you don’t have to—’ he jerked his head, not towards the door or the window overlooking Old Court, but at the corner of the room that lay in a direct line with the choir stalls, ‘show your face at chapel, do you?’ 

Charmed by the unconscious precision of the gesture and its coincidence with the Englishman’s typical skittishness in matters of devotion, Frank hid his smile behind the offer of a cigarette. ‘No. I might go to Evensong. I’m not fit to communicate, for any number of reasons.’ 

‘Not fit to—oh, I see. Thanks. I’m not used to hearing the verb in that sense. Thoroughgoing heathen.’ He did not look like one: the austere cast of his head as he leaned towards the match-flame, the slight asperity in his voice, told of something other than the incorrigible paganism of the low social milieux he now inhabited. He might pose for St Sebastian: not in the typical masochistic attitude, but before, living a double life in the Praetorian Guard. 

‘If you don’t have to rush away, I thought we might mess about on the river for an hour or two. Can you punt?’ 

‘Never really been in a position to learn.’ 

Frank bit the inside of his lip, but Lanyon’s eyebrow rose in amusement. Perhaps it really had worked out for the best: he was seeing the world, gaining practical expertise, rubbing along with all sorts and conditions of men, amassing—if his conversation last night was anything to go by—a store of well-shaped anecdotes that was a handsome substitute for the clubbability he did not truly possess. War was coming, after all; this time round England would have still less need of earnest young subalterns fresh from racquets, formal hall and the Pitt Club. 

‘You should pick it up quickly enough. You have exactly the physique for it: light and strong; not _too_ tall. Above six foot and—one’s centre of gravity, you know. I’ll get Challis to pack us a picnic—and _not_ Hock. What do you like?’ 

‘Beer and sandwiches is about my mark.’ 

‘I have a very reasonable little ’29 Burgundy that’s just ready to drink.’ 

* 

‘It’s like Piccadilly Circus.’ 

‘Up to a very distinct point. It’s only the second weekend of term, and no-one’s really settled to work yet. Anyway, collisions are part of the sport.’ 

As if in illustration, a punt manned by a lanky, stork-like fellow lurched across their bow; mutual evasive action left the other boatman gangling as he regained control, soaked from cuff to collar by the runoff from the pole. 

‘I see what you mean about the centre of gravity,’ said Lanyon. ’Why don’t people stand on the treads, down there?’ 

‘One simply doesn’t. I mean, one does at Oxford. But they punt from the wrong end, so it mostly evens out, in terms of inefficiency. So here we go, stand to the side of the till, lift the pole clear, drop, drop, drop, touch bottom, keep it close or you’ll spin, wrists loose, twist as you go or it’ll get stuck, if it _does_ get stuck—’ 

‘—let go, pronto.’ 

‘Exactly— _and_ let the pole float up and use it as a rudder, correct the drift, then go again. Which isn’t high style, but it’ll do for a rooky.’ 

‘Let me watch you for a bit.’ Lanyon murmured, narrowing his eyes—quite needlessly—against watery autumn sunshine. 

When he took his turn he proved more than competent, though with a tendency to steer through congested patches using the language of the lower deck. On one occasion his muttered but audible invective was directed at a schoolboy who, upon pushing back a fringe of mahogany curls, revealed herself a girl wearing slacks, plimsolls and a pyjama jacket. Frank’s bowels shrank, but she merely said in a crisp public-school accent, ‘The bloody same to you, matey, with copper-plated knobs on,’ and grinned gallantly down at her fluffy blonde companion in white mohair and green silk. There would be war in our time, Frank thought, and these bold, unsexed children would fight it: it was terrifying. 

Even after twenty years, even under overcast skies and the grim circumstances of David’s desertion, the almost alchemical change to the landscape a few hundred yards upriver of Sheep’s Green could still make Frank smile. Lanyon’s face lit up, and if the years didn’t exactly roll off him, they receded until you could believe him the age he actually was. 

‘I know,’ Frank said, ‘I still don’t know exactly where or how it changes from “urban, squat and packed with guile” to “peace and holy quiet,” but I’ll never tire of it.’ 

’”And when they get to feeling old, they up and shoot themselves, I’m told,”’ Lanyon added, a little unexpectedly, or perhaps not. The friendly brutality was characteristic equally of the hearty normality of the mess and the darker recesses of Queer Street; it was odd how many mannerisms were. 

‘I’d best not go all the way there, then. I expect on a day like this the Meadows won’t be too bustling.’ He had set out with the firm and sensible intent of making some spots a little less sacred to David, but there was no sense in overdoing it and going to the Orchard Tea Room or Byron’s Pool. 

They found a good spot, sheltered from the chills scudding off the river and screened from the Meadows’ wide vista by a clump of low elms, lay down the rug, propped Frank’s folding stool against a trunk and unpacked the basket. Challis had done them proud with the picnic—a bit too proud: Frank felt the queasiness that he had thought dispelled by fresh air return at the sight of hard-boiled eggs and cold veal pie. Lanyon ate politely, but showed more zest for the Pommard. 

At length he rolled over to stretch at Frank’s feet, lying with one knee raised, his back arched so that the base of his ribcage was visible as a faint line through his shirt, glass in his right hand, his left arm framing his head, cigarette in hand. Nothing more different from David’s uncontained flop and loll could be imagined—even the lock of fine, sun-bleached hair falling onto Lanyon’s brow looked as if a sculptor had positioned it—but somehow it didn’t bloody well help. To his horror, Frank felt warm moisture glazing his eyeballs; he yawned to give it some excuse to be there. 

‘Yes,’ Lanyon said, sitting up and taking a final drag of his cigarette. ’Me too. Another minute and I’d have been dead to the world.’ He drained his glass. ‘Shall we stroll into the village? This lot will be safe in the punt, won’t it? No—let me: it’s a one-man job.’ That meant _I can’t stand to have another man dither and bungle around me_ ; it was curious, for once, to be on the receiving end of the sentiment. 

Frank made to stand, but his game leg betrayed him, the knee turning to molten lead. It was some chilly comfort to know that even had he done a better job of concealing the pain, Lanyon would probably still have noticed; he flung out an instinctive arm. Frank grasped it, wheezing shamefully, yet not quite so overwhelmed that he could not appreciate the firm sinew palpable through coat and shirt. 

‘It’s just a bit stiff. Sitting in the punt like that, and then here.’ 

‘Still, it won’t help to go stamping over uneven ground with it all tensed up. Let me have a look. We have a doctor on the run I’m doing now, of course, but when I was working tramp steamers—I mean, may I?’ 

Frank raised his head and saw in Lanyon’s even gaze the burning need to serve; indefatigable as long as he had something to protect, and as long as that thing was not himself. There would be a war, and to lead men one had to learn a measure of self-preservation. For those who did not, a sojourn in Dottyville was more likely than a paragraph in the _Gazette_ for acts of gallantry that would surely have merited the MC had this popular and capable officer not fallen—but there was always that too. 

‘I suppose it can do no harm,’ he relented, letting Lanyon ease him back down onto the stool. 

‘That’s not what Alec says—he’s the bloke I lodge with when I’m ashore, medical student. Menace to society, is his line.’ He knelt, bending over Frank’s outstretched leg. ‘Above the knee, isn’t it?’ 

‘Your boy friend,’ Frank said exasperatedly. 

Lanyon’s hands did not pause, nor did he look up. ‘I wasn’t being delicate. We had a rather stupendous row before I left for Quebec City. He wasn’t there when I got in, but your telegram was.’ 

‘Christ, I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean you to drop everything—’ 

‘No. Did me a favour, bit of breathing space. If we’d met before I had my landlegs back it would certainly have clapped the tin hat on it. So, we’re—well, your situation is very different. It’s only been two years, for me. How’s that?’ 

‘Agonising. Don’t stop. Where’d you learn?’ 

‘I didn’t. I found out. That ship that Hall fixed me up with—the _Zuleika_. I went ashore with the Old Man in Las Palmas and he turned over his gash ankle on a patch of oil. We didn’t have time to find a doc, the fellows we were meeting expected punctuality and weren’t too keen on people who made themselves conspicuous to the authorities. Sounds a bit derring-do, I know, but it was actually condemned corned beef. Anyway, I sat him down on a stack of empty pallets and somehow worked out what to do to get him walking again. Bad-minded old bastard, Feneck, but I had a lot of time for him. Nothing like him for a fixed idea, even by the standard. The last one he ever had was that I could somehow rub sepsis out of him, the old fool.’ 

Frank grimaced; his leg was already feeling better; he should ask Lanyon to stop, but something about the steady, impersonal, intelligent touch made him want to let go of responsibility. More of it, and he might become reckless, but he didn’t care about that either, so he supposed he already had. Lanyon continued for a few minutes in silence, then said, ‘Maddox, why me?’ 

‘I beg your pardon?’ 

He sat back on his heels, but still held Frank’s lower thigh between his hands, exquisite hands, that seemed to have taken the share of beauty meant for his nearly-handsome face. ‘You’ve plenty of moral support here. That chap last evening—Jevons, and the other he mentioned might turn up, the mathematician. They’re men who understand. Why me?’ 

Frank snorted in disbelief. How could someone be so attentive and yet so imperceptive? 'Why do you think?’ 

‘Oh, good. I thought you might be worried you were exploiting me, and that’s why—’ 

Frank didn’t have the feeling of being pounced on, but Lanyon must nonetheless have moved with astonishing alacrity, for all at once he was on one knee in an odd parody of fealty, his left hand on Frank’s shoulder and his right on his jaw, coaxing Frank’s lips towards his own. Lanyon had kissed him once before, five years ago, on a stinking Thames mudflat in Chelsea—for all the callowness of the approach, the kiss itself had been comfortable and satisfying. 

‘I meant,’ he mumbled, ‘there’s a respectable distance. I don’t have to see you every other night in the Eagle, or at the Senate H—‘ 

‘Exactly.’ Which was undeniable. Frank had meant only that there were some people, however trustworthy, whom one simply saw too often to take into confidence, but had he subconsciously intended this all along? 

The kiss was swift but searching; it seemed to infuse Frank with some of Lanyon’s lack of self-preservation: it certainly left him panting and more than half-hard, and then one of those finely-made hands was on his flies, and there was no half about it. 

‘Couldn’t you have done this four hours ago?’ he gasped. ‘My set has doors that lock and everything.’ 

‘Couldn’t _you_? Don’t worry, there’s nobody about.’ 

Lanyon had the buttons open and only the light jersey of Frank’s smalls was between them: Frank would have liked to be rubbed and sucked though it, but there was no time for languor; Lanyon’s fingers slipped into the vent and brought out his member. Frank clasped the back of the boy’s neck and braced against the stunted elm; Lanyon found a rhythm with the same brisk ease with which he'd handled the punt-pole. 

A breeze caught up in the branches, the punt knocked against its mooring, the light turned chartreuse and middle-afternoonish, _Ô lutteurs éternels,_ Frank thought, _ô frères implacables!_ but this bout was the very reverse of eternal, for him it was already over. With a workmanlike bob of the head and a brief, excruciating swirl of his tongue, Lanyon preserved Frank’s clothes from stain; Frank all but screamed through clenched teeth. 

‘Shh—’ Lanyon hissed, pulling away; but glinting in his eye was the pleasure of accomplishment. 

After a moment of total prostration, Frank recovered himself, adjusted his clothes and buttoned up. ‘What about you, my dear? I—’ 

‘Another time,' said Lanyon, complacently, falling back onto his elbows. ‘If you like. I had to relieve the tension first, so you can tell me about David and this amazing bloody bitch of a merry widow, you must see that.’ 

‘Well, there’s disarming, and then there’s you—Ralph. I warn you, it’s a long story. We ought to get the punt back—’ 

‘And then it’ll be roughly opening time. I can get the last train to King’s Cross; I’ll just need to telephone a pal from the pub.’ 

So, somewhat in fits and starts, interrupted by minor water hazards and the return of the punt to the boathouse, Frank told the tale of David Blaize and the Very Unmerry Widow. Lanyon was a good listener: he asked the right questions, maintained the right sort of encouraging silence and tactfully supplied cigarettes, charmed the barmaid of the Elm Tree into something like table service. 

‘Well,’ he said, at the close of the narrative. ‘I didn’t know there was more than one way of accidentally getting hitched up. Not outside of an Edwardian farce, anyway.’ 

‘David and I _are_ —or were—an Edwardian farce. Mrs Fleming’s more a melodrama.’ 

‘I managed to get myself into that muddle once. The usual way. But the girl wasn’t having it—she took care of the whole thing. She had a damned lot of pluck.’ 

Frank was—if he was to be honest—shocked to his Edwardian core, horrified and disgusted, angry and jealous. But perhaps, he thought, maintaining a conscious open-mindedness over acrid gulps of the decoction that Ralph called ‘B.B.’, men of his exclusive inclination really were rather a nineteenth-century phenomenon: these neo-Georgians would be like their earlier Georgian forebears, frank and bawdy with all comers, or even more so, like the Elizabethans. And perhaps, being thus essentially sixteenth- and seventeenth-century in temperament, they could withstand a Europe engulfed in violence, as his generation had so notably failed to. 

‘David said that I shouldn’t mind that side of it—’ Frank heard his voice, ridiculously fruity, pealing above one of those mysterious conversational troughs that sometimes open in places of public resort, but committed, ploughed on, ‘—because the dreadful business with that cad of a Canadian liaison officer left her completely frigid.’ 

Lanyon’s deep-set eyes were wide and the corners of his mouth pulled down into a Silenic grin. The ‘public’ (though in the Elm Tree there was no saloon or lounge, only a rudimentary snug) turned with an eerie, Hydra-like gravity, staring upon them long enough for Frank, panicking, to attempt recall of the basics of close combat training. Then the monster breathed again, lost interest, and chatter rose to its former height. 

‘Maybe nothing very much needs to change. You’ll see almost as much of him as you ever did, and if she’s not—I mean, better this, than the classic manoeuvre of going radio silence for six weeks and popping back up to tell you all about the new boy friend.’ 

There it was, that appalling new-old Georgian pragmatism again. ‘Everything’s changed,’ Frank sighed. ‘I thought we had it settled—we’d avoided the perils of a substitute domesticity, he in the Chelsea flat—’ 

‘I remember it, jolly nice.’ 

‘—yes, of course, and I here, alternate weekends—and he bolts off for a painted plaster Angel of the House.’ 

‘Some men need a mother. Of course, the psychological explanation is that we— _nous autres_ —were too close to ours, and couldn’t bear to assume the incestuous posture—’ 

‘ _Nous autres_ ,’ Frank murmured, deprecatingly. 

‘That’s what I said.’ 

‘You didn’t, really, dear boy, you know.’ 

‘I’m afraid my accent _is_ fairly appalling. I was on the science side.’ 

‘I’m sorry, how ghastly pedantic of me. My mother’s French—did I ever say? She went back after the war and remarried. I’m very fond of her, and if there’s another go round, doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? But not—anyway, David’s mother died giving birth to him. I don’t see how it can possibly apply.’ 

Frank was not—to his knowledge—particularly drunk. But it was also undeniable that his last utterance had lacked a good deal in coherence and cogency. 

‘Well, it’s bollocks, isn’t it?’ Lanyon said, with a calculated vulgarity which allowed Frank, briefly, to imagine what Alec must be like, and why they found it impossible to get on. ‘Your round, Maddox.’ 

When Frank returned from the bar, they talked of Test cricket and the Munich agreement, as gentlemen ought. Like all people under thirty, Lanyon took war as a given of his future; Frank sensed an enthusiasm tactfully suppressed out of respect for the sensitivities of his elders. Lanyon telephoned his friend in London, who didn’t pick up. Savagely gratified, but unsure what he wanted out of it, Frank offered to put him up for another night. 

‘No,’ Lanyon said, ‘I can’t—it won’t get me back to Bridstow in time. I know the cabmen’s shelters and so on—well, you remember how I do.’ His lips were drawn in a hard, resentful line, but he said, ‘Thank you. I’ll always be in your debt.’ 

They shook hands on the edge of Parker’s Piece. Frank stared after the trim, square-shouldered figure until he dwindled to the size of a doll and turned onto the Hills Road. Nothing was right, there would be another war, and these crude, primitive, brave youths would fight it while he, not old but lame, must stand aside. He murmured, _But time will not permit: all is uneven, and every thing is left at six and seven_. It was Shakespeare, he was pretty sure, but why had it stuck with him, an undistinguished scrap of rustic grumbling? Back in his rooms, with the concordance on his knees, he saw why: he was the fussy, fustian Duke of York, yoked to an old order when everything told him to join with the new. But would the new have him? 

That night he successfully suppressed tears, as he had now for sixty-seven successive nights; the difference on this sixty-eighth was that he did not think of David Blaize until he had altogether mastered himself, and the thought of David, warm as it was, did not disrupt the self-mastery.

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Rupert Brooke, ['The Old Vicarage, Grantchester'](http://www.bartleby.com/232/701.html). “Urban, squat and packed with guile” (describing Cambridge people, can confirm) “peace and holy quiet,” ”And when they get to feeling old, they up and shoot themselves, I’m told,” quote the same poem.
> 
> 'Ô lutteurs éternels, ô frères implacables!': Charles Baudelaire, 'L'homme et la mer' ('Man and the Sea'); lit. 'O eternal wrestlers, o implacable brothers!' 
> 
> 'But time will not permit: all is uneven, and every thing is left at six and seven': Richard II, 2,ii.


End file.
